Vietnam

As I said at the end of the last blog, things can only get better from that low of being stopped by the customs officials, and to a certain extent, they have.

It continued to pour down in Hanoi for my second day there, and I was wondering whether I'd ever be able to leave the hostel. I met some people in the hostel, and ended up playing scrabble with them.

When the rain eventually subsided, I went out to explore Hanoi. The city itself is quite strange - the rules of the road here seem even more scant than in China/India, and you are regularly confined to the pavement by crowds and crowds of mopeds driving past.

The architecture is equally interesting. It looks almost European, with brightly coloured houses surrounded by hanging creepers.

Hanoi itself doesn't have a great deal going on. We are currently staying in the old district (with the millions of other foreigners), and there's not much to do hear. Everything shuts at 11pm, there's no famous monuments or museums, and most of the city is indistinguishable from the rest. However, it does retain a certain charm, given to it by its lush greenery and brightly coloured buildings.

I haven't yet formed an opinion on the people here. They speak slightly more English than the Chinese, but I still feel crippled by inability to communicate with them. They also tend to pester tourists more than in China, and I constantly feel that I'm being cheated here, by a street peddler or hotel clerk trying to get one up on me.

For the first couple of nights, I stayed in the Hanoi Backpacker's Hostel. This place came recommended by the Lonely Planet and by a number of other travellers. The place was OK, but it seemed to be full of 18-19 year old British gap year students, who thought that they were on a booze cruise to Magaluf, not in an Asian city that shut down at 11pm.

After a day of doing very little in Hanoi, I took a trip to the Perfume Pagoda, a couple hours outside of the city. It was raining heavily, but we still took an hour and a half's trip up the river in a boat that looked like it had it was meant for one person, not the 6 of us that sat on it. The river itself was beautiful, despite the rain, and this meant that even sitting on a small wooden bench for 90 mins was slightly more bearable. The pagoda was a cave at the top of a small hill - the cave and height of the structure was very impressive, but aside from that, I felt like I'd seen it all before!

The next day, I took a bus to Halong Bay, where I was spending a night on the Ocean Wave. Halong Bay is aiming to be voted as one of the new wonders of the world, and I can see why. The place was beautiful. The whole area was this still, placid expanse of water, punctuated by the occassional hill or island. It helped that the weather was good, and that the people we travelled with were good fun, but I had an amazing time.

Tomorrow I go to Sapa, a former hill station in the north of Vietnam. The place is home to Vietnam's village people and minority groups, so hopefully I'll have a lot of nice photos.

Hope all is well back home.


Nihal